If you were writing a strategic plan for a major academic research library in 2007, what would it look like?
Here are two answers to that question:
The DSpace UK & Ireland User Group has put up a list of DSpace Installations in the UK and Ireland on the DSpace Wiki.
In a move that could change the $5 billion legal publishing marketplace, Carl Malamud, who established public.resource.org earlier this year, plans on making more than ten million court decisions freely available on the Internet.
Here's an excerpt from "A Quest to Get More Court Rulings Online, and Free":
Mr. Malamud has a significant track record in battling publishers over public information. In 1994 he began a crusade that ultimately persuaded the federal government to make records from the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Patent and Trademark Office available online to the public at no cost.
He said the free availability of that digital information did not undercut the businesses that were making money from the information at the time. . . .
The Public Resource effort is one of several attempts to make the nation's laws more accessible. One project, AltLaw (altlaw.org) is a joint effort by Columbia Law School’s Program on Law and Technology and the Silicon Flatirons program at the University of Colorado Law School to permit free full-text searches of the last decade of federal appellate and Supreme Court opinions.
Source: Markoff, John. "A Quest to Get More Court Rulings Online, and Free." The New York Times, 20 August 2007, B6.
Athabasca University has established AU Press, which will publish open access books, journals, and other digital publications.
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
AU Press, Canada’s first 21st century university press, is dedicated to disseminating knowledge emanating from scholarly research to a broad audience through open access digital media and in a variety of formats (e.g., journals, monographs, author podcasts).
Our publications are of the highest quality and are assessed by peer review; however, we are dedicated to working with emerging writers and researchers to promote success in scholarly publishing.
Our geographical focus is Canada, the West, and the Circumpolar North, and we are mandated to publish innovative and experimental works that challenge the limits of established canons, subjects and formats. Series under development in several subject areas will promote and contribute to specific academic disciplines, and we aim to revitalize neglected forms such as diary, memoir and oral history.
At AU Press, we also publish scholarly websites with a particular focus on distance education and e-learning, labour studies, Métis and Aboriginal studies, gender studies and the environment.
Here’s a list of a few Web/Web 2.0 resources and tools that developers may find useful.
The Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) and SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) have released the SPARC Canadian Author Addendum.
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
Traditional publishing agreements often require that authors grant exclusive rights to the publisher. The new SPARC Canadian Author Addendum enables authors to secure a more balanced agreement by retaining select rights, such as the rights to reproduce, reuse, and publicly present the articles they publish for non-commercial purposes. It will help Canadian researchers to comply with granting council public access policies, such as the Canadian Institutes of Health Research Policy on Access to Research Outputs. The Canadian Addendum reflects Canadian copyright law and is an adaptation of the original U.S. version of the SPARC Author Addendum. . . .
An explanatory brochure complements the Addendum. Both the brochure and addendum are available in French and English on the CARL and SPARC Web sites and will be widely distributed. SPARC, in conjunction with ARL and ACRL, has also introduced a free Web cast on Understanding Author Rights. See http://www.arl.org/sparc/author for details.
Two EDUCAUSE Live! Podcasts have been released:
Portico is launching a e-Book preservation study, which will last the rest of the year.
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
In response to several requests from publishers and libraries, Portico is conducting a study in order to assess how to extend its archival infrastructure and service to respond to the emerging need to preserve e-books. During the study we will analyze the structure and preservation needs of e-books and determine what adjustments to Portico's existing, operational and technological infrastructure and the economic model developed to support e-journal preservation might be required in order to respond to this new genre. Portico's e-journal archiving service was developed through a pilot project that drew heavily upon engagement with publisher and library pilot participants. We anticipate that a similar process will be essential in understanding how best to respond to the challenges of e-book preservation. . . .
The current participants in the E-Book Preservation study include:
Publishers
- American Math Society
- Elsevier
- Morgan Claypool
- Taylor and Francis
Libraries
- Case Western Reserve University
- Cornell University Library
- McGill University
- SOLINET
- Texas University Libraries
- University College of London
- Yale University Library
SHEPRA has released Institutional Repositories: Staff and Skills Requirements.
Here’s an excerpt from the document:
This document began in response to requests received by the core SHERPA team for examples of job descriptions for repository posts. Its development has been greatly assisted by contributions from the SHERPA partners and UKCORR members.
This document will be revised annually (July/August) to reflect changing needs and requirements. Input from the repository community will be sought at this time.
The German National Library and SUB Göttingen have announced the official release of the kopal Library for Retrieval and Ingest on diglib.
Here's an excerpt from the message:
The kopal project (Co-operative Development of a Long-term Digital Information Archive) was dedicated to find a solution to providing not only bitstream preservation but long-term accessibility as well in the form of a cooperatively developed and operated long-term archive for digital data. The German National Library, the Goettingen State and University Library, the Gesellschaft fuer wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung mbH Goettingen, and IBM Germany have been working in close cooperation on a technological solution. The now released software tools mark the successful development of such an archiving solution.
The Open-Source-Software koLibRI is a framework to integrate a long term preservation system as the IBM Digital Information Archiving System (DIAS) into the infrastructure of any institution. In particular, koLibRi organizes the creation and the import of Archival Information Packages into DIAS, and offers functions to retrieve and to govern them. Preservation methods like data customization and migration of data are part of the tasks of long term preservation. koLibRi Version 1.0 provides modules that manage future migration procedures. koLibRI Version 1.0 provides a completely functional and stable condition. Nevertheless, in the context of connecting new partners to the existing long term preservation system, the software will be constantly adjusted to the needs of different partners.
A documentation has been published with the conclusive release that describes the installation and the adjustment of a functional koLibRi-system and the basic internal layout to make individual development possible. The described release is offered for free download. . . .
The Storage Networking Industry Association has released the 100 Year Archive Requirements Survey. Access requires registration.
Here's an excerpt from the "Survey Highlights":
The Fedora Commons Website has gone live.
Here's an excerpt from the About Fedora Commons page:
Fedora Commons is a non-profit organization providing sustainable technologies to create, manage, publish, share and preserve digital content as a basis for intellectual, organizational, scientific and cultural heritage by bringing two communities together.
Communities of practice that include scholars, artists, educators, Web innovators, publishers, scientists, librarians, archivists, publishers, records managers, museum curators or anyone who presents, accesses, or preserves digital content.
Software developers who work on the cutting edge of open source Web and enterprise content technologies to ensure that collaboratively created knowledge is available now and in the future.
Fedora Commons is the home of the unique Fedora open source software, a robust integrated repository-centered platform that enables the storage, access and management of virtually any kind of digital content.
Here's an excerpt from the press release about the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation grant that helps fund the Fedora Commons:
Fedora Commons today announced the award of a four year, $4.9M grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to develop the organizational and technical frameworks necessary to effect revolutionary change in how scientists, scholars, museums, libraries, and educators collaborate to produce, share, and preserve their digital intellectual creations. Fedora Commons is a new non-profit organization that will continue the mission of the Fedora Project, the successful open-source software collaboration between Cornell University and the University of Virginia. The Fedora Project evolved from the Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture (Fedora) developed by researchers at Cornell Computing and Information Science.
With this funding, Fedora Commons will foster an open community to support the development and deployment of open source software, which facilitates open collaboration and open access to scholarly, scientific, cultural, and educational materials in digital form. The software platform developed by Fedora Commons with Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation funding will support a networked model of intellectual activity, whereby scientists, scholars, teachers, and students will use the Internet to collaboratively create new ideas, and build on, annotate, and refine the ideas of their colleagues worldwide. With its roots in the Fedora open-source repository system, developed since 2001 with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the new software will continue to focus on the integrity and longevity of the intellectual products that underlie this new form of knowledge work. The result will be an open source software platform that both enables collaborative models of information creation and sharing, and provides sustainable repositories to secure the digital materials that constitute our intellectual, scientific, and cultural history.
Nick Bostrom, Director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, says in a New York Times article today:
“My gut feeling, and it’s nothing more than that,” he says, “is that there’s a 20 percent chance we’re living in a computer simulation.”
Bostrom thinks so because, barring a future prohibition on creating simulated worlds or disinterest in doing so, that our posthuman descendants are almost certain to create simulations of the past. The more simulations that are run, the more likely that you are in one.
By some estimates, there will be enough available computing power to create a simulated world by 2050.
However, there could be a recursive problem:
It’s also possible that there would be logistical problems in creating layer upon layer of simulations. There might not be enough computing power to continue the simulation if billions of inhabitants of a virtual world started creating their own virtual worlds with billions of inhabitants apiece.
I wouldn't count on it though.
Source: Tierney, John. "Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy's Couch." The New York Times, 14 August 2007, D1, D4.
If you have ever purchased or rented a video from the Google Video Store, it will cease to function on August 15, 2007. That's because the Google Video Store is being shut down and along with it Google 's associated DRM system.
Customers will get credits in Google Checkout for what they spent on Google Video Store products, but not cash refunds, meaning that they must buy merchandise available via that service to recoup their losses. Of course, this does not compensate purchasers for the inconvenience of having to replace their videos (assuming that they can).
This fiasco underlines a key problem with DRM: it doesn't just restrict access, it restricts access using proprietary technologies, and, with few exceptions, those technologies cannot be legally circumvented under U.S. law.
Source: Fisher, Ken. "Google Selleth Then Taketh Away, Proving the Need for DRM Circumvention." Ars Technica, 12 August 2007.
The Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress) has acquired the Digital Commons institutional repository software from ProQuest. bepress was the original creator of the software.
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
ProQuest and The Berkeley Electronic Press ("bepress") today announced that they have reached an agreement for bepress to purchase ownership of Digital Commons, the world's leading hosted institutional repository solution. Bepress will be adding sales and marketing staff and augmenting its existing customer support and services in addition to the hosting and technology services that it has always provided Digital Commons customers.
Bepress Chairman, Aaron Edlin, said "Institutional Repositories are core to the bepress mission of furthering scholarly communication and thus bepress is excited at the opportunity to build a close relationship with Digital Commons customers. Developing successful and vibrant Institutional Repositories will be bepress's central focus."
Researchers at Penn State's College of Information Sciences and Technology's Cyber-Infrastructure Lab have developed open source software called TableSeer that can find, extract, search, and rank table data from PDF files. Source code will be available at the project's close.
Here's an extract from the press release:
Tables are an important data resource for researchers. In a search of 10,000 documents from journals and conferences, the researchers found that more than 70 percent of papers in chemistry, biology and computer science included tables. Furthermore, most of those documents had multiple tables.
But while some software can identify and extract tables from text, existing software cannot search for tables across documents. That means scientists and scholars must manually browse documents in order to find tables-a time-consuming and cumbersome process.
TableSeer automates that process and captures data not only within the table but also in tables' titles and footnotes. In addition, it enables column-name-based search so that a user can search for a particular column in a table.
In tests with documents from the Royal Society of Chemistry, TableSeer correctly identified and retrieved 93.5 percent of tables created in text-based formats. . . .
Information on TableSeer can be found in a paper, "TableSeer: Automatic Table Metadata Extraction and Searching in Digital Libraries," by Ying Liu, Kun Bai, Mitra and Giles of the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology.
In a blow to the SCO Group, Dale A. Kimball, a judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of Utah Central District, has ruled that Novell owns the disputed copyright to the UNIX operating system. The judge also ruled that SCO must drop its suits against IBM Corp and Sequant as well as pay Novell part of its licensing fees from Sun and Microsoft.
Here's an excerpt from "Novell Wins Right to Unix, Dismissing SCO":
The ruling is good news for organizations that use open-source software products, said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation. "From the perspective of someone who is adopting open-source solutions to run in the enterprise, it proves to them that the industry is going to defend the platform, and that when organizations attack it from a legal perspective, that the industry collectively will defend it," he said.
Here's an excerpt from "Judge Says Unix Copyrights Belong to Novell":
The court's ruling has cut out the core of SCO's case and, as a result, eliminates SCO's threat to the Linux community based upon allegations of copyright infringement of Unix," said Joe LaSala, Novell's senior vice president and general counsel.
Sources: Gohring, Nancy. "Novell Wins Right to Unix, Dismissing SCO." InfoWorld, 10 August 2007; Markoff, John. "Judge Says Unix Copyrights Belong to Novell." The New York Times, 11 August 2007.
It’s time to decide how to focus my near-term publishing efforts and how to split them between unpaid and paid projects (including possibly shifting some energy into technical writing projects, such as computer books).
You can help by taking a short, multiple-choice survey (six required and two optional questions).
Thanks for your help.
What happens in Second Life is increasingly influencing real life and vice versa. Here are some recent highlights:
The Cornell University Library has joined the Google Books Library Project.
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
Google will digitize up to 500,000 works from Cornell University Library and make them available online using Google Book Search. As a result, materials from the library’s exceptional collections will be easily accessible to students, scholars and people worldwide, supporting the library’s long-standing commitment to make its collections broadly available.
“Research libraries today are integral partners in the academic enterprise through their support of research, teaching and learning. They also serve a public good by enhancing access to the works of the world's best minds,” said Interim University Librarian Anne R. Kenney. “As a major research library, Cornell University Library is pleased to join its peer institutions in this partnership with Google. The outcome of this relationship is a significant reduction in the time and effort associated with providing scholarly full-text resources online.”
Materials from Mann Library, one of 20 member libraries that comprise Cornell University Library, will be digitized as part of the agreement. Mann’s collections include some of the following subject areas: biological sciences, natural resources, plant, animal and environmental sciences, applied economics, management and public policy, human development, textiles and apparel, nutrition and food science.. . .
Cornell is the 27th institution to join the Google Book Search Library Project, which digitizes books from major libraries and makes it possible for Internet users to search their collections online. Over the next six years, Cornell will provide Google with public domain and copyrighted holdings from its collections. If a work has no copyright restrictions, the full text will be available for online viewing. For books protected by copyright, users will just get the basic background (such as the book’s title and the author’s name), at most a few lines of text related to their search and information about where they can buy or borrow a book. Cornell University Library will work with Google to choose materials that complement the contributions of the project’s other partners. In addition to making the materials available through its online search service, Google will also provide Cornell with a digital copy of all the materials scanned, which will eventually be incorporated into the university’s own digital library.
Barton Beebe, Associate Professor of Law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University, has released "An Empirical Study of U.S. Copyright Fair Use Opinions, 1978-2005."
Here's an excerpt from the e-print's abstract:
This Article presents the results of the first empirical study of our fair use case law to show that much of our conventional wisdom about that case law is wrong. Working from a data set consisting of all reported federal opinions that made substantial use of the Section 107 four-factor test for fair use through 2005, the Article shows which factors and subfactors actually drive the outcome of the fair use test in practice, how the fair use factors interact, how courts inflect certain individual factors, and the extent to which judges stampede the factor outcomes to conform to the overall test outcome. It also presents empirical evidence of the extent to which lower courts either deliberately ignored or were ignorant of the doctrine of the leading cases, particularly those from the Supreme Court.
Source: Beebe, Barton. "An Empirical Study of U.S. Copyright Fair Use Opinions, 1978-2005." SSRN (2007).
The Netherlands National Commission for UNESCO and the European Commission on Preservation and Access have published Preserving the Digital Heritage: Principles and Policies.
Here's an excerpt from the "Preface":
In November 2005, the Netherlands National Commission for UNESCO, in collaboration with the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (National Library of the Netherlands) and UNESCO’s Information Society Division, organized a conference entitled Preserving the Digital Heritage (The Hague, The Netherlands, 4-5 November 2005). It focused on two important issues: the selection of material to be preserved, and the division of tasks and responsibilities between institutions. This publication contains the four speeches given by the keynote speakers, preceded by a synthesis report of the conference.
The latest update of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) is now available, which provides information about new scholarly literature and resources related to scholarly electronic publishing, such as books, journal articles, magazine articles, technical reports, and white papers.
Especially interesting are: "Attitudes and Aspirations in a Diverse World: The Project StORe Perspective on Scientific Repositories," "Digital Archive Policies and Trusted Digital Repositories," "The Florida Digital Archive and DAITSS: A Working Preservation Repository Based on Format Migration," "Pathways: Augmenting Interoperability across Scholarly Repositories," A Portal for Doctoral E-Theses in Europe: Lessons Learned from a Demonstrator Project, "Progress toward an OA Mandate at the NIH, One More Time," "Reinventing the Library—How Repositories Are Causing Librarians to Rethink Their Professional Roles," University Publishing in a Digital Age, and "The World Is All Grown Digital. . . . How Shall a Man Persuade Management What to Do in Such Times?"
For weekly updates about news articles, Weblog postings, and other resources related to digital culture (e.g., copyright, digital privacy, digital rights management, and Net neutrality), digital libraries, and scholarly electronic publishing, see the latest DigitalKoans Flashback posting.
On Sunday, DigitalKoans reported that Yale had canceled its BioMed Central membership. Today, BioMed Central has replied to the Yale posting about that decision.
Here's an excerpt from the BioMed Central posting:
The main concern expressed in the library's announcement is that the amount payable to cover the cost of publications by Yale researchers in BioMed Central's journals has increased significantly, year on year. Looking at the rapid growth of BioMed Central's journals, it is not difficult to see why that is the case. BioMed Central's success means that more and more researchers (from Yale and elsewhere) are submitting to our journals each year.
An increase in the number of open access articles being submitted and going on to be published does lead to an increase in the total cost of the open access publishing service provided by BioMed Central, but the cost per article published in BioMed Central's journals represents excellent value compared to other publishers.
The Yale library announcement notes that it paid $31,625 to cover the cost of publication in BioMed Central's journals by their authors in 2006, and that the anticipated cost in 2007 will be higher. But to put this into context, according to the Association of Research Library statistics, Yale spent more than $7m on serial subscriptions. Nonetheless, we do recognize that library budgets are very tight and that supporting the rapid growth of open access publishing out of library budgets alone may not be possible. . . .
If library budgets were the only source of funding to cover the cost of open access publication, this would be a significant obstacle. Fortunately, however, there are other sources of funding that are helping to accelerate the transition to open access. . . .
The Wellcome Trust report estimated that on average the cost associated with publishing a peer-reviewed research article is less than $3000, and further estimated that this represented only 1-2% of the typical investment by a funder in carrying out the research that led to the article. It is not surprising therefore, that major biomedical research funders such as NIH and HHMI now encourage open access publication, and are willing to provide financial support for it. BioMed Central's list of biomedical funder open access policies provides further information.
Authors may, of course, pay articles from their own grant funds, and around half of articles published in BioMed Central journals are indeed paid for in this way. However, relying on authors to pay for the cost of open access publication themselves puts open access journals at a significant disadvantage compared to traditional journals, which are supported centrally through library budgets, and so are often perceived to be 'free' by authors.
That is why BioMed Central introduced its institutional membership scheme, which allows institutions to centrally support the dissemination of open access research in the same way that they centrally support subscription journals, thereby creating a 'level playing field'.
In order to ensure that funding of open access publication is sustainable, we have encouraged institutions to set aside a small fraction of the indirect funding contribution that they receive from funders to create a central open access fund.
Over the last several months, BioMed Central has hosted workshops on the issue of sustainable funding for open access at the UK's Association of Research Manager's and Administrators annual conference and at the Medical Library Association's meeting in Philadelphia [see report]. Further such workshops are planned.
In this way, by helping research funders, administrators, VPs of research and librarians to work together to provide sustainable funding channels for open access, we aim to "provide a viable long-term revenue base built upon logical and scalable options", as called for in statement fromYale's library. . . .
We look forward to working with librarians and research administrators at Yale to develop a solution that will make it as easy as possible for Yale's researchers to continue publish their open access research articles in BioMed Central's journals.
